Where to Golf in Review – A Worthy Course Finder?

There are many different ways to find golf courses on the iPhone. You can use Google Maps to search near your location. You can use your search engine of choice via mobile Safari. You could even pick up the phone and use 411 to find information. Where To Golf attempts to simplify finding your next golf round by providing more than just the nearest golf course.

Features

Where To Golf provides 4 different ways to search for golf course. You can search based on:

My Location

Course Name

Zip Code

City

As expected, My Location uses the iPhone’s location based services to find the courses nearest to your geo-location. Once selected, it lists the courses based on proximity to where you are. The listing contains more than just the distance you’ll need to travel to hit the links. At a glance, you’ll see icons denoting if the course has a driving range, food & beverage, cart availability and the number of holes (usually 9 or 18) along with price and course rating. This information is very useful for selecting a course while traveling or on vacation.

From the course listing, a user can then drill down to obtain more course details. Along the bottom is a tabbed view for the course details and actions:

Tapping on Call Course immediately dials the Pro Shop.

Home contains an overview of the course including the address, green fees breakdown, weather and course details (par, yardage, rating and slope).

Details shows even more information about the course:

Course Access – information regarding the type of course, whether it is open to the public or if it is a private country club.

Training Facility – details on if there is a driving range and other professional services that might be offered by the course.

Amenities – shows the hours of operation for the Pro Shop and other restaurants, Pro Shop products available for purchase and types of beverages that they serve.

Rentals – information on cart and club rentals. Also caddy availability (I guess this is renting a person for a few hours…) is shown here.

Layout – detailed information about the course, including grass type the course uses, water hazards, the number of sand bunkers and how the yardage markers are employed.

Map – opens the course location in Google Maps. From there you can use the directions feature within Google Maps to traverse to the course.

Reviews – user submitted reviews on the course selected.

Design / Interface

Form versus function. Designers of everything from applications to cars struggle with this question. Where To Golf falls just short in this tug-of-war. While it is appealing to the eye in some instances, this application could benefit from a simplified UI experience. While not the worst in displaying rows of data, tweaking the way the course data is displayed would improve the user experience in a very positive light. The information that it provides has great value, but trying to add in graphics for show cheapens the user experience.

Conclusion

As an avid golfer, I find Where To Golf to be a very valuable application. In lieu of trying different avenues to find the perfect place to play a round of golf, Where To Golf consolidates all of the data users ranging from novice to experienced will need to make their selection. While I was not a big fan of the UI, the real value lies in the data it contains. That being said, there are a few draw backs that need improvement. Driving directions are a wonderful feature, but based on some of the courses I plotted there is a need to improve the transition from the app to Google Maps.

This review was brought to you by TouchMyApps guest contributor Jamesus